The Phil Swing years Part 1: Hitting a wasp nest
Philip David Swing arrived in the Imperial Valley in 1907 as a newly minted lawyer. He probably could not imagine that in a few years he would become the pivot upon which the fate of the Valley would turn.
At only 22 years old, Swing arrived with a small stipend from his uncle. He had decided that being a clerk in his brother’s San Bernardino law office wasn’t to his liking. In just a few years, he became the IID’s lead council, a judge and an emissary to Washington, D.C., lobbying for an All-American Canal and a high dam to keep the Imperial Valley’s water supply reliable and safe. In 1920, Swing was elected a U.S. congressman. He then wrote the legislation that stipulated the design and funding of Hoover Dam, the world’s largest engineering project at that time.
A little luck
Phil Swing had talent and he had ambition. On top of that, he had luck. His luck was meeting a mentor by the name of John M. Eshleman, also a lawyer. Eshleman arrived in the Valley for his tuberculosis just a few months before Swing. Otherwise, he would have stayed in the San Francisco Bay area, where he had already served as a state assemblyman and deputy district attorney of Alameda County.
Though Eshleman came here to convalesce, he happened to arrive at a time when his legal services were sorely needed. The locals had just decided to split off from San Diego County to form a new one: Imperial County. Eshleman helped with the paperwork; Swing became his protégé. When the county was formed, Eshleman became district attorney and Swing his unpaid assistant. Then Eshleman and Swing combined to help create the Imperial Irrigation District in 1911. Soon Eshleman’s talents were needed back in Alameda, so Swing assumed Eshleman’s duties, working as district attorney for Imperial County from 1911 to 1915.
Two big water problems
Swing then joined the staff of the Imperial Irrigation District, where he was chief counsel
from 1916 to 1919. The IID had two big problems: too much water and too little water. In the winter when Wyoming and Colorado froze, the Colorado River could be as low as 3,000 cubic feet per second. In the summer when the snow melted and rains fell in several states at once, 300,000 cfps wasn’t uncommon.
That meant water famine or flooding. The IID also had to cope with its supply canal and its flood control being in Mexico.
When the IID sent Phil Swing to Washington in 1919 to ask for a dam and an All-American Canal, it was like hitting a wasp nest. Suddenly a swarm of buzzing parties emerged to contest the deal.
The waters of the Colorado River flowed through seven different states: Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. Each one wanted water and electricity from the river; each one feared the other states would cut them out.
It wasn’t only state governments in play. The city of Los Angeles and the utility Southern California Edison had designs on building a dam and a power plant on the river.
So many questions about a dam
Some basic questions quickly emerged. If a dam were to be built, would it be a low, relatively inexpensive dam just to control flooding and provide water for irrigation? Or would it be a more expensive, high dam that could generate electricity?
Who would pay for the dam? What entity would generate electricity? The United States already had a well-developed, privately-owned power generating sector, which was hungry for that concession and that money. But that might create a monopoly.
To start to answer these questions, in 1919 the House Committee on Irrigation of Arid Lands approved a study of the entire Colorado River situation. It would take three years to complete.
Congressman Swing
Realizing that he would be more effective working from inside Congress, Swing ran to represent the 11th District and its seven counties, including San Diego and all the way up to Inyo County. He campaigned well and won.
Once Congressman Swing arrived in D.C. in 1921, he got busy and wrote legislation to build a high dam on the river and an All-American Canal.
Again, luck came Swing’s way in the person of Arthur Powell Davis.
Davis oversaw the U.S. Reclamation Service. He headed up the study of the river that had been progressing since 1919. Davis was also the nephew of John Wesley Powell, who was celebrated for his two trips exploring the Colorado River in 1869 and 1871.
In 1922 Arthur Powell Davis issued the Fall-Davis report, entitled “Problems of the Imperial Valley and Vicinity.” Davis proposed exactly what Phil Swing wanted: a high dam, and a power plant built by the United States government — and an All-American Canal to give the people of Imperial Valley a reliable water supply.
With this report in hand, Swing submitted his bill to the House Committee.
It hit a brick wall, however, because it did not include guidelines about how the waters of the Colorado River would be divided up.
The Colorado River Compact of 1922
To solve this problem, the Colorado River Commission was formed with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in charge. For months, the members bickered. Each state vastly overestimated the amount of water it needed. Finally, Delph Carpenter from Colorado proposed to divide the waters of the river into half. Based on overly optimistic data about how much water was in the river, the commission allocated 7.5 million acre-feet annually each to the upper basin states (Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico) and lower basin states (Arizona, Nevada, California). The division point was, and still is, Lee’s Ferry, a bit downriver from the Glen Canyon Dam.
It was an elegant solution, but Arizona refused to sign the agreement, known as the Colorado River Compact. Arizona feared that California would gain rights to vast quantities of water simply by using it. That could block Arizona’s future claims. This was the doctrine of prior appropriation, or “first in time, first in right” — a doctrine that protects the Imperial Valley’s rights to Colorado River water to this day.
Problems back home
While Phil Swing’s legislation languished in Washington, D.C., the Imperial Valley lived at the center of the turmoil. Everyone worried about water. During winter when flow rates were meager, no water would enter the IID’s diversion canal. To raise the water level, IID had to construct a low dam across the Colorado River below its intake gate. Yuma would then require the IID to blow up the dam in the spring, fearing that high spring flows would back up and flood Yuma farmland. This was expensive. To keep out heavy spring floods, the IID also had to maintain 75 miles of levees in Mexico. On the political side, the Valley was divided. Any dam upriver would solve the problem of too little and too much water. So why also ask for an All-American Canal if it would prevent Phil Swing’s bill from passing? There was still the possibility that Congress would require the residents of the Imperial Valley to pay for the dam themselves. That might be a crushing financial burden.
Congress saw confusion all around them, and if the people of the Valley weren’t solidly behind Swing’s proposal, they weren’t going to approve it. It died in committee.